Moving Beyond Capitalism (But Not Through Socialism)

Before you read this post, you have to watch this video:

When you're done watching, read on. I'll wait for you.


Okay, finished watching? Good. Now I have a few things to say. But before I start, I want to share the first thing I wrote down when I first watched this:

I'm still trying to think about how a cooperation-based economy would be fundamentally different than a capitalist economy. I'm not entirely sure I followed where he was going with this talk....
Is he saying that we might be able to create a new form of economy where each of us works together in ways that create wealth for us all as opposed to just ourselves? His mention of the ultimatum game seems to be used as evidence to show that even when we lose out in a capitalistic sense, we may have an innate desire to cooperate in such a way that everyone gains fairly in the end. Is he extrapolating this to say that the new economy will be one where a companies might start doing things that help everyone, even when self interest ceases to be a motivating factor, simply because to not be fair is to invite the wrath of a public which expects cooperation no matter what?

Regardless of whether this is what he was in fact thinking, this is where his talk has taken me. The altruistic punisher effect, as he showed it, is quite small. On the large scale, the only thing close to it is a society which bands together via taxes to impose regulations on others. But a HUGE portion of society (I'm talking about you Ron Paul fanatics who visited this blog for the sole reason that this entry came up on google blog search for the "Ron Paul is awesome" quote that I just gave) does not feel that these regulations are a good idea. (Even Ann Coulter has publicly stated that when she listens to Ron Paul speeches, she starts to fall in love with him up until he talks about foreign policy, at which point she says she regains her sanity.) Is it possible that while the altruistic punisher idea works consistently on the small scale, it breaks down at larger scales?
I'm thinking about it, and it certainly makes sense that if the ultimatum game is played with a million dollars, and player A claims $900 000, you'd have to be crazy to turn down the $100k. Yet then he starts to give examples of companies that are starting to go altruistic today. As more and more companies fall into this mold, will it happen that we as a society will come to expect such behavior, and then punish those companies that don't exhibit it? If so, then companies will HAVE to be cooperative, even if it is to their detriment, since if they don't, society will make it even further to their detriment.
... To be honest, I'm still really fuzzy on all this. If you ask me again tomorrow, I may hold an entirely different view. But today, as I write this, the idea seems not only plausible, but also the evidence Howard Rheingold gave seems to actually support the idea that we could be moving in that direction as we speak.
What do you think?

Skateboard Accident

So I'm sitting in my top floor office with a window (I'm just special like that, apparently), working off my three hour recording session for our weekly thirty minute podcast by reading Dilbert cartoons, when all of a sudden I hear someone screaming at the top of his lungs. Due to a certain someone who shall remain nameless for now, my immediate thought was that I'd just experienced witnessing my first stabbing. After all, living in the DC metro area is apparently very different from the bible belt of southern alabama. (Though to be fair, there don't seem to be many KKK members up here.) But after looking out my window and verifying that whoever perpetrated the incident was running away, I rushed outside, phone in hand, to render whatever help I could.
The young man was lying in the middle of the street, howling in pain. A skateboard lay upside down on the curb some two meters to the side. Being a philosophy/physics/math person, I never bothered learning anything in the field of biology, so I literally knew nothing to do other than rush to his side. Thankfully, the person I'd seen running away through the window was a companion that was running to get a car to take the guy to a hospital. While doing my best to help steady him, I lifted him into the car after only a few short minutes, and then the two of them drove off.
This marks, I think, my first 'emergency'-style experience, unless you count the time that Phoe stabbed me with a katana blade. But I was on the receiving end that time, so I don't think it counts. I hope I did the appropriate thing. I sometimes worry that perhaps I won't be any good in an emergency, but I think I did okay in this one. Certainly I did better than anyone else in the immediate area, as not a single other person ran out to help the guy, though I did see a couple of people come out as the car was driving away.
Anyway. Back to Dilbert.

Emoto's Emotive Water Crystals

You may have heard about Masaru Emoto before--he's the guy who claims that emotions, when directed at water just prior to freezing, will cause the water molecules to freeze in patterns that are associated with the emotion in question. He is, as you might imagine, completely fucking retarded.
Nevertheless, because the US gov't is also completely fucking insane, they actually fund studies to deal with such issues from time to time (okay, all the time). The one I want to bring to everyone's attention today was sponsored by the National Institute of Health.
I will quote directly from the abstract:

A group of approximately 2,000 people in Tokyo focused positive intentions toward water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. That group was unaware of similar water samples set aside in a different location as controls. Ice crystals formed from both sets of water samples were blindly identified and photographed by an analyst, and the resulting images were blindly assessed for aesthetic appeal by 100 independent judges. Results indicated that crystals from the treated water were given higher scores for aesthetic appeal than those from the control water (P = .001, one-tailed), lending support to the hypothesis.

For those of you who skipped over the primary source quote because of some delusion that secondary sources are better, what this is saying is that they tested whether or not water crystals looked "more aesthetically appealing" after "positive intentions" were directed at the water prior to freezing, and the result was statistically significant.
I bet Emoto peed his pants when he found out the results were in his favor.
But for those of you who think I am showing this because I want to convince you to the Emotive Water Hypothesis point of view, please stop being an idiot. The point, instead, is to explain why even when a double blind experiment takes place, its results are not necessarily conclusive.
Whenever someone does an experiment, you get a result. If you do the experiment well, you'll get lots of results, because you'll do things lots of times under exceedingly similar conditions, and compare them to control conditions. The idea is that if you just do the experiment once, you may get a result which is not ordinary; perhaps because there was some error in the performance of your experiment, or even just because you happened to get a high maximal result or a low minimal result of a range of results that you could have gotten.
By this, what I mean is that if you measure the length of a board only once, you may have accidentally measured incorrectly. Or you may have measured in a specific place which gave the longest possible measure of the board. The only way to really get an accurate measurement is to redo the measuring multiple times. If you get the same result twice in a row, that gives you more confidence in your result. Even better if two separate measurers get the same result. And likely there will be a range of answers--some results will be high, and some low. The 'real' measure is somewhere in between. (For you philosophers out there, the existence of a 'real' measure is actually disputed itself, but that's a topic for a future journal entry.)
Anyway, the hope is that by measuring multiple times, you are more likely to not have all the measures be too high, or too low, or consistently mismeasured. This is why, in the NIH experiment with Emoto's water, you have multiple people on every side of the experiment, all giving results multiple times. They were attempting to make it less likely for all the measures to be consistently incorrect.
But even though you have lots of people working together on measuring and remeasuring, there is still the possibility that everyone will, wholly by chance, consistently measure too long a length. We want this chance to be as small as possible, so we say some results are statistically insignificant, even if they give results higher or lower than expected.
For example, let's say the length of board is 100 units (u) long. If we do the measurement twenty times, then depending on the method of measurement used, we might expect to get results back of 98u, 101u, and maybe even a 105u. 90% of the time, these are the results we would get back from measuring. So if we got these results back, and the hypothesis was that the board was 100u long, we'd say that these results corroborated the hypothesis. But remember I said that these measurements are of the kind you might expect 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, you might get twenty measurement results of which ALL are 102u and above. This would be a statistically significant difference. If these were the results, we'd say the hypothesis that the board is 100u long is less likely true than an alternate hypothesis that said it was 105u long. And we'd say this EVEN IF the 'real' measurement was just 100u long.
Rearrange the above figures so that instead of just a 90% probability, you instead use a 99.9% standard, and you can see even more extreme distances. .1% of the time, a multiply repeated experiment might result in concluding that a hypothesis of the board being 125u long is corroborated, even if it is only 100u long. This is a rather extreme example, but you get the idea.
The end result is that this NIH study is a lottery winner. It is a true rarity--it gives corroboration to the 125u long hypothesis, even though that hypothesis is wildly incorrect. Over time, if the experiment is repeated again and again, you'd expect the results to get closer to reality. But that would mean the NIH would have to sponsor yet another study on emotive water with American tax dollars.


Now I'm going to go eat a cold slice of pizza as a reward for actually updating this blog.

Huckabee Announces Chuck Norris as both Head of Homeland Security & Secretary of Defense

Presidential Candidate Huckabee, at a rally in Alabama today, announced that if he gets elected President, he would appoint Chuck Norris as both Secretary of Defense and Head of the Department of Homeland Security. I am NOT kidding. I predict Huckabee will now win Alabama's vote.
Update: Here's a link. The link only mentions the sec of def part; but he said in his speech that he'd appoint him to both simultaneously. As soon as I get a news source to verify, I'll post another link.
Correction: Apparently I misheard on cspan. Chuck Norris is just going to be secretary of defense. He's appointing Nature Boy Rick Flair as Head of the Department of Homeland Security. This is still fucking unbelievable, though.

Google.org Announces Aid for Climate Change, Poverty, & Other Emerging Threats

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

Today, Google.org announced its new core philanthropic initiatives: Climate Change, Poverty, & Emerging Threats.

Google.org is the public service component of the Googleplex machine. In the past, Google.org has helped in many different areas, but without a real specific focus. But today (17 Jan. 08), Google.org’s mandate to make the world a better place has decided on a few very specific foci, by zeroing in on five core initiatives.

Predict & Prevent

Google.org’s Predict & Prevent initiative focuses on empowering local communities to predict and prevent events before they become crises by identifying hot spots and enabling a rapid response. The first step of this new program is targeted in Southeast Asia and tropical Africa, with grants given to Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters, Global Health and Security Initiative, and Clark Labs.

Inform & Empower to Improve Public Services

Google.org’s Inform & Empower initiative is aimed at improving the flow of vital information to increase basic services for the developing world. The program is at first targeted in India and East Africa, with grants given to Pratham, the Centre for Budget & Policy Studies, and the Center for Policy Research.

Fuel the Growth of Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises

Google.org’s SME support is intended to lower transaction costs in SME investment and to create opportunities to access larger financial markets. The program is initially focused on the developing world, with initial partner TechnoServe.

Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE

Google.org’s REeSolar

 (pdf), a solar power oriented power plant technology company.

Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT)

Google.org’s RechargeIT initiative aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating hybrid electric vehicle adoption. Unlike the other four initiatives announced today, Google.org specifically mentioned that its investments in this area will mostly go to for-profit companies that are working in this area.

Google Giving

It’s refreshing to see a company so dedicated to giving back. Google sometimes has to deal with a number of critics, but their Google.org division seems to be fully intent of fulfilling their mandate of “making the world a better place”.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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